Synology DiskStation DS213j Review

Disk Installation and Software Setup

Installing drives into the DS213j is an easy process. First we slide the two halves of the chassis apart and this reveals the drive bays. Next we screw in our storage after sliding it into place and then the case is closed and two screws hold it shut. Also worth noting is that the DS213j features a 1.2 GHz CPU (floating point enabled) and has 512 MB DDR3 on-board memory. It draws up to 19w in use and idles at 3.65w.

As with previous Synology models we used the Disk Assistant software, or web interface accessed through find.synology.com, to install the operating system on the drive and get our DiskStation up and running.

The first step is to install the latest DiskStation Manager software on our device along with setting up a username and password. The wizard recommends we use a Synology Hybrid RAID setup so that addition of drives in the future is as quick and easy as possible then we let the DS213 configure itself. (Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) allows us to mix drives of various sizes in a storage pool, rather than matched drives.) Overall the DSM installation process takes approx. 10 minutes to complete and supports up to 2x4TB drives in SHR, Basic, JBOD or RAID 0 and 1 with read of 100MB/s+ or writes at 70MB/s.

Once the DSM software is installed the login page automatically shows and allows us to log directly into the device.

The next screen we see is the quick start wizard which explains some of the key features present in DiskStation Manager. From here the device is ready to use…

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1 Comment

Rob June 30, 2014

I bought one of these just before Christmas 2013.
I use it for file storage, and transferred my mail server to it soon after.

Whilst it does absolutely everything it says on the tin, the only problem is Synology itself.
I had religiously upgraded the firmware every time a new version came out, and everything was fine until 3 months ago, when , after a firmware upgrade it started rebooting itself. At first the reboot was every couple of hours so it wasn’t a huge deal. Then after another firmware upgrade it became worse until it was continuously rebooting.

I raised a support request with synology very early on, and checked their forums. A lot of people had experienced this, but synology took the line that it must be a hardware problem. I went through the various hoops they set me, but the one thing they would not consider was that the firmware was causing the problem.

I upgraded it again last night and instantly the problem improved although it didn’t go away.

I would not buy another one of these, and I am considering asking for my money back if they don’t stop being in denial.